Canvas Bases

Canvas Bases

Canvas Bases is an Obsidian plugin for Bases and Canvas, and a companion plugin for TaskNotes. It turns a live Obsidian Bases view into a canvas-style working board. Bases still owns the query: filters, sorting, grouping, and visible properties stay in the .base file. Canvas Bases adds spatial layout, cards, groups, relationship edges, assignment zones, and JSON Canvas export on top of that result set.

What It Does

• Adds a Canvas Bases layout to Obsidian Bases.
• Shows Base rows as draggable, resizable file cards on a board.
• Uses Base grouping as board frames, while ungrouped views place cards directly on the canvas.
• Persists board geometry, colors, manual cards, groups, zones, and linked Canvas options in Canvas Bases-owned view config keys.
• Creates or updates .canvas snapshots from the active Bases view, including native and third-party Bases layouts.
• Preserves manual Canvas nodes and edges that Canvas Bases does not own when updating a generated Canvas.
• Integrates with TaskNotes when available, while degrading cleanly when it is absent.

Screenshots

Canvas Bases layout embedded in a daily note:

Dragging a link from one card to another:

Rendered relationship edge on the board:

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.10.1 or newer.
• Obsidian Bases.
• Obsidian Canvas when opening or editing generated .canvas files.
• TaskNotes is optional. TaskNotes badges, task menus, task relationship edges, and task zone actions are skipped when TaskNotes is unavailable or does not expose the required API capability.
• mdbase is optional. When its local interoperability grant is enabled, Canvas Bases provides the canvas.card.create action contract and publishes the canvas.drop event contract to other plugins.

Using The Canvas Bases Layout

Open a .base file, add a view, and set its layout to Canvas Bases. Configure the query with normal Bases controls, then use Canvas Bases for the spatial layer.

The board supports:

• Dragging and resizing file cards, group frames, text cards, and manual groups.
• Background panning, zooming from 10% to 200%, fit view, and reset view.
• Inline Markdown body editing on file cards when Show body editor is enabled. Edits are debounced and saved back to the note.
• Card colors that carry into generated Canvas nodes.
• Pinned notes that stay on the board even when they are not in the Base result.
• Text cards for board-local notes.
• Marquee selection for creating manual groups or custom assignment zones.
• Double-clicking file cards to open the underlying note.

The toolbar can pin notes, add text cards, add manual groups, add assignment zones, create or update the linked Canvas, open the linked Canvas, and reset stored layout positions.

Assignment Zones

Assignment zones are board frames that run a drop action when a note card is dropped into them.

Bases-derived zones update the Base group property. Custom zones can be created from the toolbar or from a marquee selection and can write a different property. Property zones can replace, append, append uniquely, remove, or clear values, with automatic or explicit text, number, boolean, date, and list value handling.

With TaskNotes available, custom zones can also complete or uncomplete tasks, archive or unarchive tasks, start or stop time tracking, start or assign a Pomodoro, and complete or skip a recurring occurrence.

Creating Canvas Snapshots

Canvas Bases can create a JSON Canvas from either the Canvas Bases layout or any active native or third-party Bases layout.

Run:

Canvas Bases: Create canvas from current bases view

The modal lets you choose the Canvas path, layout, edge source, TaskNotes relationship edges, node size, and update rules. Saved options are reused by:

Canvas Bases: Update linked canvas
Canvas Bases: Open linked canvas

Generated Canvas files use stable Canvas Bases-owned node and edge IDs. Updating a Canvas can preserve existing Canvas Bases positions, remove Canvas Bases-owned nodes that no longer appear in the Base result, and keep unrelated manual Canvas content intact.

The generated .canvas file is a snapshot, not a live query. Update it again after changing the Base result set or board layout.

Edges And Links

Canvas Bases renders live board edges and writes Canvas edges when both endpoint notes are present on the board.

Edge sources:

• none
• wikilinks: links found in notes in the current view
• properties: links from configured note properties
• all: wikilinks and configured note properties

Property edge names are configured as a comma-separated list, for example:

depends_on, related

Dragging from a card's link handle to another card opens a relationship menu. Canvas Bases can create configured frontmatter property links, and when TaskNotes is available it can also create supported dependency or subtask relationships. Existing removable property and TaskNotes relationships can be removed from the edge context menu.

TaskNotes Integration

TaskNotes support is optional and capability-based. When available, Canvas Bases can show TaskNotes status, priority, due date, blocker, recurrence, time estimate, tracked-time, and active-tracking badges on cards. It can also use TaskNotes task menus from card actions and render dependency or subtask edges on the live board and generated Canvas.

If TaskNotes is disabled, absent, or missing a capability, Canvas Bases keeps the Bases and Canvas workflows working without TaskNotes-only behavior.

mdbase Interoperability

With the mdbase plugin installed and Allow local application interoperability enabled, Canvas Bases registers one action provider:

[email protected]

The action appends a text or file card to a selected .canvas file and returns the created card ID. Its input and output are defined by an mdbase action contract using JSON Schema. Callers can require the exact provider application canvas-bases; provider ambiguity and incompatible versions fail explicitly.

The provider is optional and does not change normal Canvas Bases behavior.

Canvas Bases also declares [email protected] as an event source. Dropping a file card into an active group publishes a CloudEvent containing the board, record, position, target group, and whether the group assignment changed. Events are multicast, so every granted compatible subscriber receives its own copy. Contract compatibility does not grant access; the mdbase interoperability grant remains the authorization boundary.

Maintainers can run npm run test:testbed to exercise the real Canvas action provider and event source through the spec-owned provider-lifecycle and two-consumer multicast scenarios. The testbed uses the normal plugin bridge boundary and validates deterministic transcripts.

Commands

Canvas Bases: Create canvas from current bases view
Canvas Bases: Update linked canvas
Canvas Bases: Open linked canvas
Canvas Bases: Create starter files